Gardening in Pyjamas: Horticultural enlightenment for obsessive dawn raiders

By Helen Yemm

This is the perfect book for you if you are one of the many people who feel that gardening could be your ultimate pleasure if only you knew just that little bit more about it. The Daily Telegraph's much-loved columnist Helen Yemm manages to strike a happy balance between giving you enough information to get you going and not so much that it scares you or puts you off entirely. She dispenses invaluable advice, minus the mumbo jumbo, with refreshing humour and a clear understanding that not everyone has the wherewithal, in terms of time and finances, to spend every possible moment in the garden.

So if you find yourself padding about your plot in your nightclothes without really knowing what to do, Gardening in Your Pyjamaswill provide you with all the essential facts to nurture your growing passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Apr 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781471126994

Book preview

So, what do you wear when you’re gardening?

Some years ago, during a lull in the cut-and-thrust, question-and-answer part of one of the gardening classes I used to give, some bright spark, no doubt feeling the need to show keenness by volunteering a question, asked ‘What do you wear when you are gardening?’ I always assured my nervous novices that no question would be too daft, so I was obliged to answer this one in all seriousness: ‘My nightie, as often as not – and wet slippers.’

Thus was born the title of my first book (written in 2000) Gardening in Your Nightie. It was based on the kind of basic stuff I used to teach and written very much from the heart for fellow gardeners – women – for it is they who seemed to do most of the obsessive horticultural grovelling and grafting and apparently still do. Despite being an un-glamorous, un-illustrated paperback (definitely no pictures of the author en chemise de nuit) – Nightie nevertheless hit the spot for, among others, the then gardening editor of The Daily Telegraph. It led ultimately to more than a decade of garden writing, most notably my weekly no-nonsense ‘Thorny Problems’ letters page in the Telegraph’s Saturday gardening supplement, condensed into a book of the same name in 2011.

In the years since I first put fingertips to clunky word processor, much has changed. Accusations of mild sexism, twenty-first-century wardrobe refinements and general horticultural correctness necessitated the title change to Gardening in Pyjamas for this updated version. But more seriously, the use of chemicals in the garden has changed radically in a more ecologically conscious world, providing us with unavoidable challenges, while the word organic – even when used with a very small ‘o’ – has to be more keenly acknowledged than heretofore. An extra decade of experience has changed the horticultural habits even of old diehards like me.

It would appear, however, that avid gardeners are still up to the same old tricks. Out they go in the early hours full of good intentions, as often as not with a battered fleece flung on over inadequate nightwear and with a long-gone-cold cup of instant clutched in hand. They plan, plot and dream, interrupting their reverie to tweak here, poke there, even hitching things up a bit to facilitate a plunge into the back of a border to nip off an errant shoot perhaps, or to tweak at a weed. For the lucky home-based few, these shenanigans can go on for the best part of a morning, cut short only by the arrival of a bemused visitor at the front door. For most, however, early-morning raids may constitute the principal gardening time in the week. A glance at a scratched watch face has them scurrying indoors, scrubbing the soil from knees and fingernails, throwing on more respectable garments and rushing to work, leaving the sartorial secrets of their muddy habit strewn damply over the unmade bed.

Real gardening basics have not changed that much, however, and it occurred to me that now that the infamous gung-ho-paint-it-all-blue instant makeover years have thankfully faded into history, the unglamorous facts of life (or death) out there that can so thoroughly befuddle beginners, need spelling out and explaining again in words of (mostly) one syllable. So Gardening in Pyjamas aims again to cater for those new (and not so new) to gardening who have lots of questions they scarcely dare ask – but want the answers to be kept simple. It is for those who want to know how to achieve a beautiful garden, but have been scratching about indecisively using inappropriate tools, with sodden hair and a wrecked back, wondering all the while whether actually they have been doing more harm than good. Deep down in their aching bones they know that gardening could be the ultimate leisure pleasure if only they understood just a little bit more about it.

The Thorny Problems book seems to have found its way to many a bedside table (or – yes, I know – the bookshelf in the loo), and I fervently hope that Gardening in Pyjamas does the same. There are still, as you will have noticed on your first perfunctory flip-through, no mouth-watering illustrations to bring on irrational shopping trips, no tedious photographic step-by-steps featuring a model with immaculate fingernails and not a single demoralising line drawing showing you how to prune improbably perfect shrubs. I learnt a lot of my gardening by just getting stuck in and having a go, armed with some helpful basic information gleaned largely from my parents, both of them botanists, teachers and skilful gardeners. What follows is my version of that information augmented by my own experience and it will, I hope, make your precious gardening time more rewarding. I hope you will dip in when desperate and find just enough to get you started, but not enough to scare you stiff.

CHAPTER 1

What a lot of gardeners don’t know and don’t like to ask

As I write, there are scores of perfectly competent gardeners scratching away in their beloved oases as happy as sandboys, but for that occasional, irritating thought that there is a whole lot of stuff about plants that they just don’t know – and that might have made their horticultural lives a little easier. I am not talking about advanced botany, or serious science, but the basic things that many gardening books and experienced gardening friends take for granted that we know – the lack of real understanding of which can eat away at our self-confidence and consequently get in the way of imaginative and satisfying gardening.

It is all a bit like those early school experiences that dog you for the rest of your life. I think I was ‘away’ the first time my class encountered long division. I never ever got the hang of it, and I have never ever dared ask anyone to explain it to me since. My subsequent terror of maths, I am convinced, stems from that time. Thank God for the invention of calculators.

If you walk round a garden with its really learned owners, they will explain everything and anything to you, for most love to talk. But you are hardly likely to stop them in mid-flow to ask them what they mean when they say such-and-such is a useful biennial. Most probably you won’t get to ask the really meaty questions that are burning within, for fear of revealing scores of gaps in your basic knowledge and looking silly. Furthermore, gardeners are hopelessly generous and in return for your appreciation will invariably press trowelfuls of their treasures or, even worse, branches of rare shrubs for you to ‘take a few cuttings’ from, all of them with incomprehensible Latin names, on to you. It is all supposed to be part of the fun, a tangible expression of the overwhelming need of most gardeners to share their enthusiasm with others. But it can be equally overwhelming to be on the receiving end. So here is my guide to that common language we gardeners use to communicate.

REAL BASICS YOU NEED TO GRASP

I should hate this book to become one of those useful but dry little numbers – an A to Z of largely obscure horticultural terms. You sense that the writer of such books has been dredging around trying to fill each letter section with as many definitions as he or she can find to make you realise how much there is you don’t know about plants and gardening. I will try to include explanations of key words within each section of the book, but I do think it is important to understand exactly what the following mean before you read on.

Annuals

An annual plant is one that completes its growing cycle during one season and will not survive frost. This group of plants includes petunias, busy Lizzies, nasturtiums and so on, and most of them need a lot of sun.

The term hardy annual applies to those plants whose seeds can be sown directly into the ground in spring or even autumn. Their seeds germinate as soon as the soil is warm enough and the days long enough – they then cope with whatever Mother Nature throws at them. Many hardy annuals will therefore self-seed, so that once you introduce plants such as love-in-the-mist, marigolds or nasturtiums into your garden, you will find that they become a more or less permanent fixture, which is quite fun.

Most annuals, however, are tender and have to be raised from seed in a warm greenhouse or on a windowsill indoors. Being expensive to buy and time-consuming to maintain, they should be grown in pots and other containers, and used to create bright spots of colour or fill gaps in a new garden. My real favourites are the big annuals: cosmos, cleome and tobacco plants. You have to make sure you get hold of Nicotiana affinis if you want those big, white tobacco plants that glow in the dark and knock you sideways with their scent. (I have actually known garden centre staff to fib about what they offer you. Many of the modern cultivars available are miserable little scentless things, I find.) These larger annuals, real floppy whoppers, spend the midsummer months achieving their often breathtaking height, and then reward you with flowers well into the early autumn, when the rest of the average British garden can look a bit sad and burnt out.

At the end of autumn, pull out exhausted annuals and chuck them away, even though they may look as though they want to jolly on past Christmas. You can keep some seed of the best of them, and start again the following year.

Biennials

A biennial plant is one that takes two growing seasons to complete its cycle. During the first year the new seedlings produce a small amount of rather uninteresting leaf growth but do not flower. If they survive the ravages of slugs, snails and fanatical weeders until the next year, they will produce loads of flowers, millions of seeds and die a very ugly and dramatic death at the end of the summer. The most well-known examples are foxgloves, honesty and forget-me-nots. It is really important to learn to identify biennials when they are very young – you can do this by comparing the leaves of the baby and the adult – because you can quite easily transplant biennials after their first year of growth. Indeed it is generally necessary to thin the seedlings out where they make colonies and threaten to stunt each other’s growth. I adore the self-seeding biennial population of my garden – constantly ebbing and flowing, providing bits of haphazard colour in unexpected places. If it threatens to overwhelm, I just weed things out.

There is a variation to biennials. Some plants, notably angelica and some verbascums, are what is known as monocarpic, which means they may take more than two years to become mature enough to flower and set seed, after which they generally die.

Perennials

A perennial (also referred to as a herbaceous perennial) is a frost-hardy, non-woody plant (in other words not a shrub, see below) that comes up year after year. In this group are the favourite summer flowerers – lupins, delphiniums, campanulas and so on. As I explain in the chapter on mixed borders (see pages 81–112), perennials do need a certain amount of attention – protection from slugs, annual feeding, supporting with canes or twigs, deadheading to keep them flowering for as long as possible, cutting down to ground level in the winter and division every few years – but they are incredibly rewarding once established. A few, generally short-lived perennials (such as the Welsh poppy and sweet rocket) will seed themselves gently around the garden. I love that, and it is one of the main reasons it is so important to learn to distinguish seedlings from weedlings.

Half-hardy perennials

These include many fuchsias, argyranthemums (marguerites), pelargoniums (geraniums), verbenas and helichrysums, which are mostly used for container planting. These plants are true perennials in their native (hotter) climates, and can limp though most mild winters in towns (where it is a degree or so warmer), if they are given the shelter of a wall, kept fairly dry, and if their roots remain unfrosted. Even if you overwinter them in a greenhouse or porch, where they may be subjected to bad pest attacks, they have to be cut back, cleaned up and generally ‘rejuvenated’ in the late spring if they are to perform well the following year.

Shrubs and trees

A shrub or bush is a plant with several woody stems coming from the base and can be anything from 15cm (6in) to 6m (20ft) in height. Those sold in UK garden centres and nurseries should all be frost hardy, although ideas about ‘climate change’ have brought a rush of blood to the head to some nurserymen and I have on occasion seen tender shrubs such as some abutilons and Lantana camara sold without a warning label to say they wouldn’t stand frost. Some hardy shrubs may suffer winter damage to their extremities if they are exposed to icy winds but will generally recover the following summer. Almost all shrubs need pruning or tidying at some point during the year once they are established.

A tree is a single-stemmed woody plant from a few feet to well over 15m (50ft) in height. Some trees (notably eucalyptus, paulownia and some willows) can be persuaded to become almost shrub-like by being stooled each year in the spring – that is, cut right to the ground and encouraged to make several branches from their bases.

THE NAMING OF PLANTS

It was not until I started gardening that I really discovered the value of Latin. More than anything, Latin plant names seem to fill people with horror. The fact that we no longer study Latin in most of our schools seems a huge shame. Initially I hated the subject as much as most, but began to realise fairly early on that Latin not only held the key to English spelling but also helped to lessen one’s fear of learning other European languages. After an otherwise hopelessly flawed school career – I think I could best be described as detention-seeking – my Latin has become a welcome reminder that I am not without a brain. All those jars of broad beans that mouldered away on the school lab windowsill when everyone else’s flourished, all that stuff about amoeba and spirogyra, the life cycle of the tapeworm, and questions on the natural vegetation of the tundra – freesias, was my oh-so-bright response, I recall – went in one ear and out of the other. But my familiarity with Latin has really helped me with plant names.

The binomial system of naming plants, as it is called, dates back to the eighteenth century, when a Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, decided that all plants should be given Latinised names (actually many of the generic names come from Greek) consisting of two words: the name of the genus (see below) – e.g. Potentilla, Skimmia, Delphinium or whatever – and the name of the species (see below) – e.g. fruticosa, nepalensis, japonica, alba, neumanniana, or some such. Thus the ‘surname’ comes first, and the ‘first name’ comes second. Heaven only knows what kind of chap Linnaeus was, and can you imagine what kind of gardener he must have been? I bet poor old Mrs Linnaeus (Linnaeus mrs kitchenensis, perhaps?) had a hard job stopping him planting things in rows and putting labels on everything.

The reason why we are stuck with an embellished form of this ancient system is because it really is necessary. We simply cannot get by with common ‘English’ names because they don’t describe the plant accurately. I use common names whenever I can do so without causing confusion: how can we abandon such evocative gems as lady’s mantle, love-in-the-mist, granny’s bonnet, love-lies-bleeding, Solomon’s seal, lily-of-the-valley and many more? So, like many gardeners, I use a confusing jumble of names, a compromise, in rather the same way that I have managed partially to convert to metric measurements: I am more than capable of saying that such-and-such is 3 feet high and 30 centimetres wide (and most people of my generation don’t bat an eyelid). But we do need to take it all on board. I will therefore try to give a broad outline of how the system works as simply as I can, while apologising to real botanists for probably oversimplifying the whole issue.

I shall use the following plants to illustrate my description: Potentilla fruticosa var. arbuscula, Potentilla fruticosa ‘Elizabeth’ and Potentilla nepalensis ‘Miss Willmott’. I have chosen potentilla as an example since I know that it causes confusion. Why, I have been asked by more than one disappointed novice, is it that the sad little sprawly potentilla they put in their own garden bears so little resemblance to the familiar shrubby pale-yellow-flowered one resplendent all summer long in their friend’s garden? This is my rather long-winded reply. Bear with me.

Plant families

All plants belong in ‘families’, the members of which share certain botanical characteristics that may or may not be obvious to gardeners. If you look closely at the individual flowers of sweet peas, laburnum and clover, for example, you will see they are similar in shape. They all belong to the pea family (Leguminaceae). If you visit a botanic garden, you will find plants grown in large beds with other members of their family. It is quite a good way of putting the jigsaw puzzle together, but actually the family names are, I think, the least important part of a plant’s name, from our point of view.

The genus

Plant families are broken down further into smaller groups or genera (the singular of which is genus), containing plants that are even more closely related. But the genus Potentilla (which belongs, incidentally, to the rose family, Rosaceae), contains both shrubs and herbaceous perennials (see pages 4–5), which, though they have similar flowers, for example, have different growing habits or other subtle characteristics. This is why the name potentilla (or cinquefoil, its common name, which is a corruption of French) on its own is pretty unhelpful, particularly when you are out shopping.

Plant species

The vital second word on a plant label, or in a plant directory, is the species name. This will often, but by no means always, tell you a lot about the plant. It will describe either how it looks or smells, tell you where it comes from or even tell you the name of the person who first found it growing in the wild and brought it into cultivation. This is generally the part of the plant name that gives new gardeners the collywobbles, but it is not too hard to learn a few of the more obvious ones (which are related to English words), and find a book that tells you the meaning of the more obscure-sounding ones. For example, Potentilla fruticosa is a shrubby or woody (which is what ‘fruticosa’ means) plant; Potentilla nepalensis (from Nepal) happens to be an herbaceous or non-woody one. Even if you do not have the energy to get to grips with the actual meaning of each one, you really need to know that this part of the name is important.

Varieties

I am afraid there is more, much more. There is generally a third word (sometimes Latinised, sometimes English) on the plant label. This is the variety name – a further category that helps to identify plants more precisely. If it is a naturally occurring variation in a plant, say a different leaf or flower coloration, then it will be quite simple – variegata (variegated), alba (white), hirsutum (hairy) and so on. Hence Potentilla fruticosa var. arbuscula (meaning something like ‘shrubby little bush’). If it is a cultivated variety (i.e. a variation that has occurred since it became a garden plant), then it will often have a recognisable English or other European language name written within quotes. Thus Potentilla fruticosa ‘Elizabeth’, or Potentilla nepalensis ‘Miss Willmott’. The term cultivated variety is now often shortened to ‘cultivar’.

How knowing the Latin name can help you buy the right plant

In fact using the diversity of the potentilla tribe mentioned above helps illustrate this rather neatly. How did those nervous novices get it so wrong? The explanation is usually simple: they remembered the name ‘potentilla’, swanned off to the garden centre and grabbed the first potentilla they came across. Their friends may have Potentilla fruticosa ‘Primrose Beauty’ or ‘Elizabeth’ growing in their gardens – both easy-to-grow bushy shrubs. What the novices acquired by mistake